by Sonia Nova
But then, she realized the words he had spoken hadn’t been said in the Alliance standard, but the Agari language.
Her brows furrowed and she looked up at Arez in confusion. He didn’t return her gaze, simply staring forward at the Krezlians, and Naomi turned to look at them as well, her eyes widening as she put it all together.
The Krezlians had been expelled from the Alliance before the Agari had joined. And while they could speak the Alliance language at least somewhat, they likely did not speak Agari. Her rising panic diminished a bit at the fact, and her shoulders relaxed. Whatever Arez’s plan here was, he obviously didn’t want the Krezlians to understand him. He was on their side.
Naomi took a deep breath, calming herself down as they walked.
“Why did you pick me out of there?” she hissed at him in Agari.
He did look at her now, although it was nothing more than a sideways glance, no doubt to prevent drawing any more attention to their conversation than necessary.
“I… help. Maybe a plan.”
Arez seemed to be searching for words, and although his sentences were hardly grammatically correct, his knowledge of the language was still far better than Naomi would have expected.
As an Ambassador, understanding even the minute details of meetings could prove crucial, and for that reason, she had studied the Agari language extensively before even arriving on the planet. But if she was a soldier – especially one who’d been stationed on the planet for only a few turns of the moon – she probably wouldn’t know a word.
“A plan? What–?”
“Quiet!” one of the Krezlian guards hissed at them, tugging at Arez’s chain, but Naomi hardly paid him any attention. Her mind was already racing.
Arez had a plan? What kind of a plan? To get them out of here?
Oh, god, she sure hoped so. She could use some good news at this point. Hope rose within her, and although she didn’t dare to say another word to Arez, she could feel her whole body bounce with nervous excitement.
They were led into another corridor, not too far away from the first. It was similar to the one they’d just been in, but this one had even more doors on each side – more cells, no doubt. Was this a ship a prisoner freighter or what?
One of the cell doors opened before them into darkness, and the guards swiftly pushed her inside.
Naomi moaned as her body hit the hard metal floor. She could already feel the bruises forming from being thrown around before, and no doubt more were on their way after this. Damn Krezlians…
Crawling up to a sitting position, Naomi saw as Arez turned to the guards, a low growl emerging from his throat. He pulled at his chains, but before he could do much more, one of the Krezlians whacked him a good one on his head, clearly dazing him for a moment. Taking advantage, the guards began to drag him further down the hallway.
And the door to Naomi’s new cell swung shut.
Great plan, she thought to herself in the dark. Naomi made a mental note to ask Arez what the hell he had been thinking. Because this certainly hadn’t resulted in any outcome she would’ve hoped for.
Suddenly, a light turned on in the ceiling. Naomi glanced around the cell.
Except the room wasn’t a cell.
A small table flanked by two chairs stood in the middle of the room. To one side of her, the wall looked to be made entirely of some kind of glass. The glass wall reflected the light from the room’s ceiling, but was completely dark and impossible to see through.
There was only one thing this kind of a bleakly furnished and monitored room could be used for.
Interrogation.
She sucked in a shocked breath at the realization, and just then the door opened again behind her and a single guard walked in. He was quite tall for a Krezlian – much taller than Naomi – and as he walked into the room with a determined step, Naomi recoiled, trying to hide the fear on her face but sure she wasn’t doing a great job.
This guard looked… different, somehow. She watched him as he closed the door and took a seat at the table. A raised white scar ran down across his scales from the corner of one reptilian eye to the collar of his uniform. His tail thumped as he watched her without saying a word, clearly expectant.
Naomi swallowed, her skin crawling, and she wrapped her arms around herself protectively. The guard continued to stare at her, his reptilian eyes blazing. Somehow, Naomi didn’t want to piss him off.
She took the seat opposite the guard – or interrogator, whatever he was – and tried to control her breathing to hide the fear and confusion that was boiling within her, just below the surface.
There was no way to wrap her head around what was happening. Mareb’s betrayal, the Krezlians wanting all the human women, Arez picking her out of the group, and now this… If Naomi tried to think about it too hard, her head started to swim.
And she needed her wits about her now.
“Naomi Rourke, Earth Ambassador to Agaria.” The Krezlian’s voice boomed, the slitted pupils of his eyes looking straight at her. “Yes?”
“Yes,” Naomi responded, keeping her voice steady. For a moment, she wondered how they knew her identity, but she immediately realized Mareb must’ve told them. Anger rose within her, accompanied by the sharp stab of betrayal, but she pushed the feelings aside and fought to remain calm.
She had been trained for this, she reminded herself. Every Ambassador received extensive training for hostage situations and interrogations. She knew every interrogation tactic known to the Alliance and how to counter them. She knew how to evaluate the psychology of her interrogator, how to lie without detection…
But she had never actually been face-to-face with an enemy like this, in a situation where she felt truly powerless.
She took in a deep breath and sat up straighter, squaring her shoulders and looking directly at the lizard. It didn’t matter that she felt weak. There was no way she was going to let the damned lizards know they were getting to her. She was ready for whatever was about to happen in this interrogation room.
Maybe.
CHAPTER 17
AREZ
Arez growled through his teeth, struggling against the restraints that held him in place.
What the hell were they doing with Naomi?
He cursed himself inwardly for his stupidity. For pulling her into this, and for everything that had resulted in them ending up in this situation, separated. He had thought the Krezlians would take him and Naomi somewhere together where he could wait for the right moment to overpower a guard or two.
But instead, they had taken her.
And now here he was, in yet another examination room, his head still aching where the guard had hit him. He must have been knocked a good one because, by the time he had come to, he had been secured to a damned chair by wrist and ankle cuffs.
He realized there was something different going on here though. The four guards who had taken him here stood in the shadows of the small room behind him. A Krezlian in green robes – another scientist – was busily attaching wires with small pads at the end to Arez’s bare chest and the sides of his head.
“What’s going on?” he asked aggressively in the Krezlian language, pulling at the cuffs that held him to the chair.
The scientist ignored him and pressed a final pad to his chest. This male didn’t seem as fazed by him as the last scientist. Without a word, the lizard went to the corner of the room. Arez strained his neck to see the scientist manipulating something on a screen that had appeared on the wall.
“Hmm,” the scientist muttered without looking away from the screen full of graphs and symbols. “Already showing signs of great distress… but there is no change in his hormonal levels compared to before…”
Arez jerked at his cuffs again. Being treated as if he wasn’t even present in the room as the Krezlians experimented on him brought back memories he didn’t want to relive. He felt like an animal being evaluated for slaughter – powerless and insignificant – and it was a feeling he hated mor
e than anything.
“What did you do with Naomi?” he snarled, and the scientist actually looked toward him at last, finally acknowledging his presence.
“Would you like to see her?” the lizard asked, as if the answer wasn’t obvious. Arez just glared at him.
The scientist swiped something on the screen and Arez watched with shock as the entire wall in front of him shimmered away to reveal another room.
Naomi sat at a table in some kind of stare-off with what looked like a high-ranking Krezlian general – or maybe even the captain of the ship.
“Naomi!” Arez shouted her name, but neither she nor the Krezlian seemed to hear him.
A one-way glass?
Arez realized the general must be there to interrogate her. And the room he was in was a place for the other guards – and now him too – to watch it happen.
Anger boiled within him. He shouted Naomi’s name again, but he knew it was no use. She was right there, right in front of him, looking in his direction, and yet he couldn’t reach her. Not even by yelling.
What the fuck were the Krezlians up to?
This seemed like some next level torture shit. He didn’t want to find out what the Krezlians had planned for him and Naomi, but as it was, the situation didn’t look good. He had to start coming up with a new plan. Some plan to get them out. There had to be some way to distract the scientist, or maybe manipulate him into undoing the cuffs…
No matter what, he had to get Naomi out of here. Guilt nagged at him and his heart constricted. It was his fault that she was here in the interrogation room in the first place. His plan had completely failed – backfired into this twisted situation. He hoped she would just tell them whatever they wanted to know, because if they hurt her…
“The Ezak-X male who pointed you out in the cell… you know his name?”
Arez glanced up, distracted from his rapid thoughts. The Krezlian with Naomi had finally spoken in heavily accented Alliance standard. The audio from the room played through a speaker somewhere nearby. It sounded so close, as if he was at the table with them.
Naomi nodded, her expression blank and her tone careful. “I do. Arez.”
The Krezlian scoffed. “We have him catalogued as X-9087.”
Bile rose in the back of Arez’s throat as the Krezlians continued to call him that – now to her too – but Naomi’s expression didn’t change.
She must be trained for interrogation, Arez realized. She was an Ambassador, so she no doubt knew how to handle herself in there.
Except… interrogation was usually about finding out politically important information. Arez frowned. She was an Ambassador. She knew pretty much everything the Alliance was up to in these parts of space. And yet the Krezlians’ first question to her had been about him…
He couldn’t think of what information the Krezlians could possibly want from Naomi that had to do with him. And, based on the look on her face, he guessed that Naomi didn’t either. As careful as her expression was, something in her eyes told him she was on edge.
“He is your lover?”
Naomi’s eyes widened slightly and her lips parted, betraying her surprise at the question. Clearly, it wasn’t one she had expected, because as carefully neutral as she had tried to keep her face, she had completely failed in hiding her reaction to this question.
It wasn’t a question Arez had expected either. He stared at the room before him, his eyes wide in shock. He caught himself a moment later and his brow knotted in a frown.
What the hell were the Krezlians getting at here?
“No,” Naomi replied after a pause, regaining her composure.
The Krezlian’s lizard tongue flicked out and back in as he considered her. “But you are in a relationship,” he said, not asking but stating the words as fact.
Naomi blinked. “No,” she repeated. The confusion was now visible on her face.
Arez suddenly recalled the simulation the Krezlians had put him through, their comments about a human female and hormonal changes… None of it made sense, but clearly, they thought that Naomi was this female, whatever that meant.
But why? Her scent and touch did affect him, that much was true, but she was an attractive female. He didn’t see why his reactions to her would be anything the Krezlians would be interested in. And they definitely weren’t in any type of “relationship.”
“You find X-9087 attractive,” the Krezlian continued in his strangely matter-of-fact way of speaking.
“No,” Naomi answered, her tone exasperated. “Look, I don’t know what you’re trying to achieve here. I don’t know why you’re asking me about Arez, but I would never consider him as a romantic partner and we have never had any type of relationship.”
A sharp pain pierced Arez’s heart at her words. The words hurt, for a reason he couldn’t quite understand. He clenched his jaw, trying to keep his cool, but the scientist watching his reactions made a hissing noise as something appeared on the screen. Fuck. He had to remember to keep his reactions under control. He didn’t want to give the Krezlians anything to work with.
The interrogator in the room opened his jaws slightly in what could pass for a Krezlian smile. Whatever was happening here, the Krezlians seemed to be pleased with the way it was going.
“You can’t deny there is something… exciting about the Ezak-X. They are strong, powerful…” the interrogator said. “Perhaps you are lying to me.”
Naomi narrowed her eyes. “Maybe there’s a language barrier here, but you seem to have misunderstood. I am not attracted to Arez. As powerful as you claim the Ezak-X are, the fact remains that he’s an Ezak-X. I see how it’s something you would be interested in, but I’m generally into humans. More my type, if you get what I mean.”
She said it casually, as if anyone should have known an attractive human female like her would only consider human males. And of course she would. Why wouldn’t she? But still, the words stung and Arez gripped the chair under his hands, his fingernails digging into the arm rests.
He shouldn’t care who or what Naomi was attracted to, but still, each of her words felt like a dagger to his heart. When the interrogator reached into his uniform jacket and revealed a syringe, his pulse jumped and it was as though the dagger twisted.
“What the fuck are you doing to her?” Arez exploded at the scientist, struggling against his restraints. He didn’t know what was in that syringe, but he’d had enough Krezlian poison inserted into him to be afraid. They couldn’t give it to Naomi.
The scientist didn’t reply, but Arez heard something beeping in the back of the room, as if in rhythm with the accelerated pulse of his heart.
“We shall find out if you are telling the truth,” the interrogator said, squirting a bead of clear liquid out of the needle and tapping it.
Naomi stared at the syringe, her eyes full of shock and fear she was now unable to hide.
“You can’t do this to her!” Arez roared, trying to get the scientist to pay attention to him. To somehow stop the scene unfolding before his eyes.
“You– This is against Alliance code!” Naomi exclaimed, standing up from her chair swiftly. “Using narcotics in an interrogation. That’s a war crime!” She backed away from the interrogator. She was now nearly babbling, her voice betraying desperation, but the Krezlian general kept approaching.
Arez saw red. He struggled against his restraints, fighting to get loose. The metal screeched a bit, but the cuffs wouldn’t give. They were clearly made of a heavier material than the ones on the examination table, and Arez was trapped.
The guards moved in closer to him in the room, clearly wary of him. The Krezlian scientist didn’t seem to have such concerns. He left the monitoring screen to stand directly beside Arez.
“Your reactions to the interrogation are revelatory,” the lizard hissed in his ear. “This human female is the cause of your budding hormonal changes, there is no doubt.”
Arez jerked at the restraints, growling at the scientist. “Let. Her. Go,” he
urged, but the Krezlian simply took a step back and ignored him.
“It is a shame then, that she insists she does not feel the same way,” the scientist said from his safe distance, infuriating Arez beyond belief. He wanted to snap the damned lizard’s neck. “You truly are a monster, just as we created you to be. Hideous and unlovable.”
This dry, hissing voice in his ear was nearly drowned out by the rage rushing through his veins. His blood throbbed in his ears and he thought he could hear his own quickening heartbeat.
The beeping in the room intensified and the guards stepped toward him and grabbed him, trying to hold him in the chair. His restraints started to give in, just a little, and he threw them backward with just a movement of his shoulder.
“Please–”
The sound of Naomi’s terrified voice momentarily distracted him. She was out of her chair and had backed into the corner of the interrogation room, her arms wrapped tightly around her body and her expression looking fearful. Her body looked so small and weak as the Krezlian approached her with the syringe, his tail swaying.
“Please tell me what you really want to know from me,” she said, her voice half-panicked. “I’m sure we can come to some kind of agreement. Just… Please, no.”
Arez watched, unable to move. It felt like he was back in the simulation again, so close to Naomi and yet so far. Hopeless and unable to help her.
He needed to protect her.
It didn’t matter what she said or felt about him. All he knew was that every instinct in his body told him to break free of the restraints and through the glass to protect her from whatever the Krezlians had planned.
“We simply want to know how you feel about X-9087. We require the truth,” the interrogator said, now only a foot from Naomi.
A rush of fury burned through Arez and he roared as he tried again to break the cuffs at his wrists and ankles. They didn’t break, but some of the screws holding the cuffs to the chair came partly out.
He continued to strain. The scientist had retreated and was watching him with an odd curiosity on his scaly face. The few guards moved to surround him with their guns drawn, but he ignored them. The screws loosened more and more.
